Bench-marking cancelled

It was my intention to run 10 of my favorite projects on an equal resource share and determine which gave the best credit for my specific mix of OS, CPU,nVidia &ATI cards . My original intention was to run like this for a full week. I set-up last week and was waiting for the work-unit requests to level out. However it has become apparent where my credit come from already ... so I am back trying to climb the ladder this week.

You're the Collatz Conjecture user of the day!

"Congratulations!

You've been chosen as the Collatz Conjecture user of the day! Your profile will be featured on the Collatz Conjecture website for the next 24 hours."
- Thanks, Collatz!

Choosing projects

I am attached to 10 BOINC projects and often ponder what resource share to allocate to each one to get a good daily credit as well as contribute some meaningful data to science.
While there are some tables around that list the credit/hour ratings of the various projects, that real-world results are probably fairly different due to a mix of operating systems, GPU vs CPU etc.

To get some indication of how to run my "farm" for 2011, I have decided to run all the projects with an equal resource share for a week. I have allowed each project to run its own applications (no optimized apps) and its choice of sub-project.

The projects involved are:

AQUA@Home
QMC@Home
PrimeGrid
LHC@Home
DNETC@Home
Collatz Conjecture
Milkyway@Home
Rosetta@Home
Einstein@Home
SETI@Home

The only project with modified preferences is Collatz Conjetcure. Its CPU application would take around 1200 hours on my slower CPU's, thus rendering a 1 week trial pointless. Collatz's ATI/Linux app also slows my PC down to a point where it is unusable, so that is excluded too.
As AQUA@Home is currently down and tomorrow is a public holiday in Australia, I have decided to start the evaluation on 31/01/2011. This will also allow the PCs time to run out excessive work units from certain projects that had high resource share.

Collatz on x64-Ubuntu with ATI card

My home PC is almost unusable, it is so slow if I let the ATI card process data-units while I am trying to use it. I discovered by chance, that the problem only occurs with Collatz work units. DNetC does not suffer from the same problem. I have now set Collatz to "No New Work" on this machine.

Back at work :-(

Well, Jan 10 and everything is back up and running. I have slipped over 100 places internationally and 5 places in my team during my end-of-year shutdown. It's going to be a long slow process to climb back up the ladder as my hardware is now all pretty old and slow compared to the latest CPUs & GPUs... so I may concentrate on the science side instead of chasing credits for 2011!